Apple's 12 Days of Gifts App Starts Giving Out Free Content Today

Apple is wishing everyone happy holidays in the way it know best, by promoting its devices and services. Let's not be too cynical, though. Apple's 12 Days of Gifts app has started handing out free stuff today, so you'll want to get it installed on your iDevice right away.

Apple is wishing everyone happy holidays in the way it know best, by promoting its devices and services. Let's not be too cynical, though. Apple's 12 Days of Gifts app has started handing out free stuff today, so you'll want to get it installed on your iDevice right away.

So here's the deal—for the next 12 days (December 26-January 6th) the Gifts app will offer a free item of Apple's choosing from iTunes or the App Store. It might be an album, book, movie, app, game, or something unexpected. The content—whatever it is—will only be available to pickup for 24 hours. However, the content is permanently attached to your account, so you can download it to your devices whenever you like going forward.

The app looks nice with a dark brown and gold theme. The icons are all done up in iOS 7 style, as you might expect from Apple. The backdrop is subtly animated with expanding gold circles—it's a neat effect. When you tap the View Gift button, the app will pull up the store in a frame so you can grab it without leaving the app. Down below the free stuff is a list of related content that you can spend some of that holiday money on. What? You thought Apple was doing this out of the goodness of its heart?

Today's gift (December 26th) is a Justin Timberlake live single consisting of two tracks and two videos. This item would cost a few bucks normally, so there's hope the rest of the gifts will be more than $0.99 throwaway apps. You can have the 12 Days of Gifts app send you push notifications each day with the updated deal as well.

Ryan Whitwam is a freelance tech/science writer and fan of all things electronic. This long-time skeptic and former research scientist is a lover of the em dash and a defender of the Oxford comma. He also writes for Geek.com and ExtremeTech.
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